Business & Financial Report Writing

This course is delivered by a trainer who had a highly successful, long and varied “fast track” career at Lloyds Bank. This led him to a very senior management position in the bank’s private banking and wealth management division at an early age. He was then “head hunted” to join a merchant bank at the main board director level. He now has over 40 years of experience in the UK banking and financial services sector. A key feature of his duties during these careers was delivering first-class reports and training others to do so. The range of reports included compliance, risk, credit, project finance appraisals and board submissions.

This trainer has been a freelance training consultant since retiring, offering professional course sessions in several technical areas of finance. He is currently an external Master Trainer at both HSBC and Bank of China; where in addition to report writing, he has delivered major projects on a wide range of topics. He is an accomplished global trainer and has delivered extensive programmes in the UK, USA, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

He is a highly adaptive, hands-on and highly sought-after private banking and wealth management facilitator who always receives excellent feedback from delegates. He is comfortable training at any level of seniority and experience, from “black belts” to novices. In addition to his technical report writing course specialism, his expertise includes but is not limited to Risk Management, Trade Finance, Regulatory Compliance, FCC & AML and all aspects of Corporate, Private and retail Banking. He is also a highly experienced soft skills trainer and has completed numerous “train the trainer” assignments.

• Develop, improve or simply hone your report-writing skills as required.
• Hit the ground running on project report writing when you return to your normal work roles.
• Practise completing several aspects of a report as well as the different styles of report needed to meet either internal or external and even regulatory needs.
• Empower you with confidence that you are already a competent report writer; practice is now needed.
• Writing a sharp business report (e.g. commercial, financial) for either internal or external recipients (know your audience).
• Technical report writing training emphasises the importance of the executive summary.
• A shortcut to begin writing reports and avoiding writer's block.
• Identify and justify the key conclusions and recommendations.
• Understand that a clear and concisely written report is often the most effective.
• Recognise what can be removed or left out including unnecessary detail which probably should be moved to an Appendix.
• How to apply common sense and logic to convey what is important. Explaining why it is important, what the report reader needs to do and when.
• Remember at all times to ask the “so what” question to avoid too much information and detail.

• Redcliffe Training has been established for over 20 years and we are proud of our first-class reputation for delivering effective sessions on report writing.
• Our course director is not an academic teacher from a textbook. He is a hands-on practitioner with years of report writing experience - both good and sometimes not-so-good. He will bring this vocational experience into the process to bring the learning points alive and make them more relevant.
• We recognise that some delegates find different styles of report writing more challenging than others. We have designed this course so that it breaks the process down into easy-to-follow stages. We review each stage as we complete it and brainstorm any areas where our efforts could be improved.
• Having fun as well as learning new skills is a prerequisite: active participation is encouraged and all delegates will get the opportunity to practise report writing in a non-threatening environment.
• Redcliffe is pleased to have been appointed as Master Trainers to two of the world's biggest banks so we are always at the cutting edge of reporting requirements in practice. We are well aware of the main challenges and difficulties and we tackle these very early on.
• This course contains several highly interactive and very enjoyable case studies to enhance the learning points. All delegates report that these are a high point.
• We are always judged by our results which speak for themselves and the feedback received from previous delegates has always been excellent.

This training is a ‘must know’ for:

• All report-writing or report-creating staff looking for either a refresher or an opportunity to hone their report-writing skills
• Managers and Team Leaders who review reports and are responsible for coaching staff on improving report-writing skills
• Compliance & Risk Officers
• Internal Audit Staff

Effective report writing is one of those essential skills that look easy until you try to create one for the first time. We know what we want to say but how do we say it concisely and how do we extract an executive summary, recommendations and conclusions if we still can’t decide where to start?

This effective report-writing training deals with these issues from the very outset and provides useful and effective suggestions for overcoming these initial barriers.

High-quality report writing requires both practice and experience. There is no shortcut. However, the journey for some is harder than it should be, as the pressure of most working environments means that not enough attention is paid to the “basics”. We address this challenge and offer practical solutions.

There is no doubt report writing is both an essential skill and an invaluable communication tool for both the individual and the business. But it takes practice to become good at effective report writing and it helps enormously if you understand what matters and what matters less for both the individual and the business that employs them. The ability to create succinct, cogent and effective reports is extremely important and is a prerequisite skill for all levels of management and supervision.

Our technical course will take delegates through the process of report writing and will concentrate on the key skills needed to create effective business reports as quickly as circumstances dictate. We will write a report in stages as we proceed through the various sub-topics. We will highlight examples of good practice as well as poor practice and will concentrate on the key requirements for any business report; namely a strategic overview, an executive summary, a list of recommendations and/or a set of conclusions together with enough detail – but not too much – to support the recommended outcome.